At the end of November 2006, the hopes and dreams of women, especially mothers, to obtain a job with dignity and respect in Pennsylvania, died on the steps of the state capitol in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania as a result of complete, deliberate and intentional neglect by the committee chairmen of the Senate Labor and Industry Committee and the House Judiciary Committee who held the fate of SB440 and HB352 in their hands.

I like to call the season from now until the end of the year, “The Months of Eating Dangerously.” In the next forty plus days, we will all be celebrating Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanza and New Year’s. These are all wonderful holidays where we gather with friends and loved ones to rejoice in our family traditions and important religious observances. Each holiday is rich with meaning and also with rich food. We are faced with an onslaught of holiday eating. There are office parties, school parties, holiday open houses, snuggling up in front of the fireplace drinking the hot chocolate and eating the sugar cookies that were left for Santa. With all the hams, turkeys, latkes, egg nog and even the ubiquitous fruitcake, it’s no wonder the average person gains five to ten pounds over the holidays. This time of year is rough. My daughters have barely recovered from the Tootsie Pop and Hershey Kiss induced coma brought on by Halloween and we’re already making plans for the upcoming foodapolooza.

While the MomsRising discussion boards are filling with comments about the recent assault on airplane breastfeeding. Amy at Mojo Mom has logged a must-read post about how truly radical an act breastfeeding is. This new event reminded me of something I'd written about in the past, the Starbucks nursing shame.

When Judith Warner's book Perfect Madness reached the shelves a year or so back, it wasn't immediately clear that she'd become a forceful political advocate for mothers. Yes, the book did end with a slew of policy proposals. The majority of the pages offered cultural analysis, though, and more often than not, Warner seemed to tread perilously close to blaming mothers--affluent, over achieving, hyper-perfectionist mothers, the prime focus of the book--for the malaise upon us. The book's political ending was nice, but it felt tacked on. How, after all, would improved access to quality daycare really make life easier for the mom committed to hand painting paper plates for her child's birthday party? The blogosphere, especially, took aim. The lack of online word limits allowed an almost limitless analysis of Perfect Madness, and most bloggers were relentlessly critical of the book.